Portal of the Contemporary Croatian personal names

 http://osobno-ime.hr/   

The portal was created based on the Dictionary of Contemporary Croatian Personal Names, which was developed at the Institute of Croatian Language and Linguistics as part of the project Database of Contemporary Croatian Personal Names. The starting point for creating the dictionary was the database of official personal names with data on the number of bearers of each name. This data was obtained from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics and is presented according to the 2011 Census of the Republic of Croatia, which recorded a population of 4,284,889. At that time, 5,563 names with more than ten bearers were confirmed, while names with fewer than ten bearers are not published to protect personal data. In the Dictionary of Contemporary Croatian Personal Names, names with one hundred or more bearers from this database are included. Among names with fewer than one hundred bearers, those that are culturally significant (e.g., Abraham, Aron, Ahmed, Aisha, etc.) and those needed to define names with more than one hundred bearers are included.

Structure of the Dictionary Entry

Based on the definition of a personal name as a sociolinguistic sign, each dictionary entry contains the following information:

1. Personal name in canonical form: The personal name is presented without marked accent because various accent realizations of certain names are confirmed in Croatia (Ìvana – Ivȁna, Ànīta – Anȉta, Màrija – Marȉja). Indicating the accent in the standard language would imply prescriptiveness, which is not the intention of this dictionary. Therefore, names such as Srečko, Svijetlana, Stijepan, Zvijezdana are not defined from the perspective of the norm.

2. Genitive and dative forms of the name

3. Definition of the name: The definition consists of a grammatical part, identifying the name as male or female, and a descriptive part. The descriptive part of the definition determines the origin of the name, whether native or foreign. Names that are not primary are defined as "shortened from," "derived from," "based on a male/female name," with multiple definitions possible. The oldest foreign names are defined according to the cultural circles they originate from, such as saintly, biblical, biblical-saintly, and Muslim.

4. Etymology: Etymology is provided for the primary names, usually in a short, formalized form. Where necessary, more than one etymology is provided.

5. Data on the number of bearers and frequency qualification

6. Sociolinguistic data on the name: Although this is a dictionary of contemporary personal names, since the name is a sociolinguistic sign, in addition to frequency and geographical distribution data (based on data from the Croatian Bureau of Statistics on the most common names in Croatian counties during the 20th century), historical data on the time and, less frequently, the place of the first confirmation are provided. The oldest confirmations of names form the basis for diachronic anthroponomastic research.

   This part of the dictionary entry also includes explanations of the motivation for naming and linguistic data on the name, such as etymology details, intermediary languages, folk etymologies, etc., and mentions translational comparisons of names, either actual or derived from folk etymological connections.

7. Name equivalents in foreign languages: According to the dictionaries listed in the sources and literature, etymological equivalents for English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Slovenian, Russian, Macedonian, and Serbian are provided. Reflections in other languages show the spread of a particular name and the cultural circles it belongs to.

8. Name days: In the past, the calendar principle was one of the main reasons for choosing a name, which consequently, among other things, affects the frequency of a particular name in a given period. Recent research has shown that the calendar principle is still present.